An important aspect of commercial marketing is the identification of potential purchasers either from new prospective customers or from confirmed purchasers that have already bought items. To better target their marketing campaigns, more and more companies use statistical models based on customer behavior. They store purchasing data including for example the date of a last purchase, the product purchased and the monetary value of the purchase.
Targeted marketing is one of the applications of predictive modeling. Some solutions are mainly focused on targeting prospective customers, i.e. customers without a first-time purchase. Other solutions are more specifically linked to product category or brand to configure promotion packages such as in U.S. Pat. No. 6,026,370 from Jermyn.
However, there is a need for a generic solution that is independent of any product category and that improves purchaser knowledge both at the individual level as well as at a general level. Such a solution would be an efficient tool for driving short and mid-term growth.